About

Name: Scott Lazarowitz

Website: Reasonandjest.com (URL: http://www.reasonandjest.com/blog)

Contact: See here

Age: Over 39

Born and Raised: Connecticut

Location: New England

College: Majored in Psychology

Purpose For Website: To inform and entertain, and convince people that freedom is good and government isn’t, and that a genuinely voluntary society that respects individual rights and private property rights is the only system that coincides with freedom, and that freedom creates prosperity for the greatest proportion of the population while government does nothing but violate individual rights and cause impoverishment of the masses. And with cartoons making fun of the people in power who need to be made fun of.

Values: “Traditional” values, “American” values, “Judeo-Christian” values, “Western” values, “Human” values

Admire: Pope John Paul II

Music: Classical.

Personal Issues: Anxiety, need for more freedom, angst

Priorities in Life: Convincing people to choose freedom and reject the State

Would Vote in 2010 and 2012 For: Anyone who promises to dismantle government, not “reform” it!

From My August 4th, 2009 Post:

A lot of my writing here has been in the category of economics, even though I didn’t really study that. Well, that’s not true. While I majored in psychology in college, I did take one economics course, but it was sooooooo boring–I learned nothing in that class. But I studied economics in the sense of really learning about it after college, mostly during the 1980s, by hearing people on the radio and on tapes, and reading various material–mostly libertarian-based periodicals.

Thank God Gene Burns was on WRKO for several years. He was the most pro-free market, pro-private property rights, pro-freedom of association advocate I’ve ever heard on the radio. It was through his show in ‘87 and ‘88 that I heard Ron Paul, and was very fortunate to read some of Dr. Paul’s writings. (I was able to convince at least one person in 1988 to vote for Dr. Paul: one of my former psychology professors, who, after hearing Dr. Paul’s interview on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, said it was the first time he had someone to vote for, not against, for president. Me, too.)

Also in that period, I had some audio cassette tapes, including a discussion between Ron Paul and economics professor Lawrence Reed, Money and the Federal Reserve, and a lecture by Prof. Reed, Trade Cycles: The Economics of Boom and Bust, and several lectures by philosopher Ayn Rand, mostly at the “Ford Hall Forum.” And some of my reading material at the time included periodicals such as Liberty, which I now see is still in publication and online, Reason magazine, also online, and the Freeman, also now online, which is a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, whose current president is the aforementioned Prof. Reed. Other people who have influenced my thinking include the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Jacob Hornberger, economics professor Walter E. Williams, who gives a common sense approach to economic matters in everyday life, as did the late economist Murray Rothbard.

Also in the 1980s, Llewellyn Rockwell’s articles gave me a more fine-tuned understanding of private property rights. Mr. Rockwell’s website, LewRockwell.com, is probably one of the best sources of discussions on liberty out there. On LewRockwell.com, you can find articles by Ron Paul, finance professor Michael Rozeff, such as this recent one, Irrationality and Fascism in Government-Regulated Health Care, and articles by Donald Miller MD, such as the Austrian Cure for Economic Illness. Given that Dr. Miller’s main field of knowledge and practice has been in medicine for many years, he still knows economics better than probably most Harvard economists. And I say that because free market advocates think and report with reasoned analysis of actual truth of history and current events. In contrast, the economists of the Left, who oppose freedom and free markets, fantasize. Most of the people in the so-called mainstream news business also live in an irrational fantasy world, and that is why they seem to worship President Obama, their Messiah.

Unlike mainstream free market economists and the ones in the media, who deal mostly with the practicality of free markets vs. the impracticality of government-controlled markets, the people mentioned here in the first few paragraphs deal with the practicalities, but also with the morality of free market economics, as did Ayn Rand. It is moral to respect the freedom of people to trade voluntarily, and it is immoral to violate and interfere with people’s private matters and relationships. Yes, it’s that simple….

Freedom and Truth are important.

Updated December 20, 2010:

Since I had begun this website in April, 2009 and doing much more reading and research into the ideas of Liberty than ever before, I have also discovered other important websites besides LewRockwell.com etc., such as Antiwar.com, which is run by anti-war conservatives, or, more precisely, non-interventionists, such as Justin Raimondo. And Strike The Root, which is also a very “anti-State” website. And also Economic Policy Journal, which is run by economist Robert Wenzel. And also several scholars and writers that I hadn’t been familiar with before, such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Laurence Vance, William Grigg, Wendy McElroy, Arthur Silber, Glenn Greenwald and others. I can’t list everyone now, or I’ll be here writing this all day.

Philip Weiss’s website Mondoweiss has also become one of my favorites, and I have learned a lot about what’s going on in Israel from that and other websites regarding Israel and Zionism since a year ago. I have to admit that I had previously been somewhat supportive of Israel, and that’s because I never learned about the actual process that the current state of Israel was formed, and I had never really been informed about what’s really been going on there, such as the true facts about the war between the Israeli government and Hamas that wrecked the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009. The reason I didn’t know was because I had been getting my news mostly from the mainstream media. They didn’t tell me how the Israeli government destroyed the Gaza water and sewage treatment facilities there, how their blockade prevents materials from being brought in to fix it and how that’s causing the million+ inhabitants of the Gaza Strip to have to use untreated, unsanitary, unsafe water. The whole thing is disgusting. But the uninformed American public has no idea of this reality, and in fact, if you ask most people about “Palestinians,” many people have the ignorant view that “Palestinian” = “Terrorist.” THAT’s because of the mainstream media. And I had written a somewhat lengthy summary and critique of Zionism and Israel, but it didn’t seem to get noticed. Oh, well. (Update, March 2012: I wrote another article on the subject since then: Here.)

The problems that America suffers now are mainly caused by the centralizing and bureaucratizing of everything from national security to just everyday life, and it has to stop if we really think America is worth saving. The federal government is inherently flawed, and it needs to be dismantled, and the states have to have their independence and freedom back that the monstrous Leviathan in DC stole from us.